俗话说，一朝被蛇咬十年怕井绳。现在，人们可以用科学来解释这句话了。

Led by neuroscientists from NYU School of Medicine and published online July 31 in eLife, the study argues that humans recognize what they are looking at by combining current sensory stimuli with comparisons to images stored in memory.

7-31发表在Elife网的一项由纽约大学医学院的神经科学家领导的研究，认为人类当前的感官刺激会和刻印在记忆力的图像相比较，最后识别所看到的东西。

"Our findings provide important new details about how experience alters the content-specific activity in brain regions not previously linked to the representation of images by nerve cell networks," says senior study author Biyu He, PhD, assistant professor in the departments of Neurology, Radiology, and Neuroscience and Physiology.

神经科学系副教授Biyu He博士表示，这项研究发现了一个关于经验如何改变大脑中某一区域特定活动的重要细节。在之前的研究中，人们就已经发现这块区域与通过神经网络传输进来的图像没有关联。

"The work also supports the theory that what we recognize is influenced more by past experiences than by newly arriving sensory input from the eyes," says He, part of the Neuroscience Institute at NYU Langone Health.

NYLangOne健康神经科学研究所的他说：“我们所谓“看见”的东西，实际上更多地受到过去经历的影响，而不是来自视觉的输入。。”

She says this idea becomes more important as evidence mounts that hallucinations suffered by patients with post-traumatic stress disorder or schizophrenia occur when stored representations of past images overwhelm what they are looking at presently.

这个结论对于现今来说变得越来越重要，因为它可以作为证据来证明，患有PTSD和精神分裂症的患者产生幻觉的原因是，烙印在脑海中过往经历压倒性地战胜了他们眼前的事物。

A key question in neurology is about how the brain perceives, for instance, that a tiger is nearby based on a glimpse of orange amid the jungle leaves. If the brains of our ancestors matched this incomplete picture with previous danger, they would be more likely to hide, survive and have descendants. Thus, the modern brain finishes perception puzzles without all the pieces.

神经学中一个关键的问题是，大脑是如何感知事物的。例如，我们的祖先发现茂密的灌木中露出一丝橘色，他们便认为老虎就在附近。如果他们的大脑能够将这一小块图像与之前所遇到的威胁相比较，他们就能提前感知到危险的逼近，从而迅速作出反应获得生存的机会。

Most past vision research, however, has been based on experiments wherein clear images were shown to subjects in perfect lighting, says He. The current study instead analyzed visual perception as subjects looked at black-and-white images degraded until they were difficult to recognize. Nineteen subjects were shown 33 such obscured "Mooney images" - 17 of animals and 16 manmade objects - in a particular order. They viewed each obscured image six times, then a corresponding clear version once to achieve recognition, and then blurred images again six times after. Following the presentation of each blurred image, subjects were asked if they could name the object shown.

在过去的视觉研究中，提供给受试者的图像都是清晰而且光照很好的。He表示，新的研究分析了视觉的感知能力，受试者会看着黑白的图像逐渐变模糊，直到看不清楚。总共有33张这种“门尼图像”被展示给受试者，受试者们首先会看六次模糊的图像，然后再看一次清晰的图像，接着又看六次模糊的图像。在这么一个过程之后，研究人员会询问受试者能否说出图像的名称。

After seeing the clear version of each image, the study subjects were more than twice as likely to recognize what they were looking at when again shown the obscured version as they were of recognizing it before seeing the clear version. They had been "forced" to use a stored representation of clear images, called priors, to better recognize related, blurred versions, says He.

试验结果表明，受试者们在看过清晰图像后识别出来的可能性是之前的两倍多。他们会不自主地使用脑海中储存的清晰图像来对应，从而更好地识别模糊的图像。